Up to now, packages for cigarettes have been made either in glazed paper with an inside protection in a metallic paper and an outside coating made of a plastics film, or by a rectangular parallelepipedal cardboard box unit containing cigarettes wrapped inside a protection made of a metallized paper, the unit being outsidely covered by an envelope made of a film of transparent plastics material.
However, and although these packages have given satisfaction for packaging of cigarettes, it has been necessary to supply smokers, in addition to these packages, with a separate pocket of matches. This pocket of matches is readily lost or forgotten, thereby preventing the smoker from lighting a cigarette at the desired moment.
Improvements have been brought to the foregoing prior art by British patent No. 2,046,218 in which the package is such that it incorporates automatically a match box placed directly underneath a portion containing the cigarettes, and this directly by a simple folding operation after having cut out a cardboard blank.
The package according to the hereabove prior art document relates thus to a cigarette package having an envelope with side walls which are made of front and rear flaps, the front flaps of these side walls extending into extra flaps which are not connected to the respective front and rear walls of the envelope and are provided for forming an upper bottom for the envelope by defining a space with a lower bottom of the envelope, this space being provided for housing a match drawer.
Due to the above mentioned extra flaps which it is necessary to glue, there is defined an overthickness against which will abut the upper portion of a match drawer when sliding inside the space thus formed in the cigarette package between the upper bottom and the lower bottom of the envelope.
After a certain period of handling use, the hereabove overthickness prevents the match drawer from sliding correctly. Moreover, due to the fact that these extra flaps are simply bearing perpendicular against the respective front and rear walls of the envelope, there is formed a slight interval making possible a passage of the matches from the portion containing the matches to the portion housing the cigarettes, or a passage of the tobacco between the portion housing the cigarettes and the portion containing the matches.